Day 18 - Puzzles
2020 April 4
Saturday
8:03pm:
My PHU posted a cumulative total of 55 cases in my area today.
Today I went to work at a retail store in Ottawa.
Today a lot of people stood too close together in too long lines for marijuana products at dispensaries and for alcohol at the LCBO. Now, the dispensaries I can understand, because they’re no longer considered essential and close tonight at midnight. The LCBO confused me, though, as I haven’t seen any news about it closing — so either people are really bad planners for their weekend booze, or someone crossed the wires somewhere. People we standing too close, and there were still line-ups when I left work at suppertime.
It gave me the heebie jeebies.
My place of employment is closed to customers now, and we’re operating online and over the phone only with curbside and local delivery options. There are currently only three of us coming in for shifts, and we will continue to do so as long as there is enough business to justify it or until the government requests we also shut down completely. Despite it being retail, I felt far safer at work, in a relatively closed environment with only a couple employees where we all work solo shifts (for the most part), than I felt at the grocery store last night.
It’s been an interesting change for us, though, going from a primarily face-to-face type of retail environment to being a miniature “order fulfillment warehouse”. It took me the first couple hours today to find my groove with the new approach, but it’s great to still have shifts and it’s awesome to have so much support from our customer base. We’ll figure it out and have it running super smooth in no time.
Right now, most of our orders are being delivered to customer’s doorsteps, but some customers prefer curbside pick-up. This happens in one of two ways:
1. They pick up at the store: They knock on the door, step back on the sidewalk and wait for us to unlock the door, identify themselves, and wait for us to place their back on the step and close the door again. Then they retrieve their order.
2. They park in front of the store or beside the store, call us to let us know they are there, open their trunk and get into their car to wait for us. We run their order out to their vehicle, place it inside, and then they close the trunk themselves.
In terms of a touchless system, I think this is as safe as we can make it. We also sanitize shared surfaces between shifts and sanitize the door handles, too.
Weirdly, it turns out a pandemic is great for sales of craft supplies and puzzles. We sold A LOT of puzzles today. I guess that’s the result of people being cooped up inside for hours upon hours needing anything to focus on that isn’t the news.